My thoughts on defense.

February 2016

02/29/2016

Following the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines in December of 1941, the US and Great Britain had agreed to the formation of the American, British, Dutch, and Australian Command (known as ABDACOM), whose mission was to prevent the Japanese from overrunning the strategic western-held islands in the Malay Barrier. The impressive-sounding ABDACOM was in reality, anything but.

By the time the ABDA Command was formed on 1 January 1942, under British General Sir Archibald Wavell, Allied air power in the Far East had been all but destroyed. The Japanese had decimated US air forces in the Philippines (including the Navy PBY Catalinas around Cavite), while British and whatever Dutch air power had been shredded in aerial combat, bombed out of existence, or overrun by Japanese ground forces. The naval components of the ABDA were little better. The US Asiatic Fleet under Thomas C. Hart consisted of one Treaty "tin-clad" heavy cruiser, USS Houston (CA-30), the obsolete light cruiser Marblehead (CL-12), thirteen old Clemson-class flush-deck destroyers, a handful of elderly Yangtze and ocean-going gunboats, and some tenders. The most viable part of the Asiatic Fleet were 23 modern submarines, along with six elderly World War I-vintage S-boats.

The other contributors to the naval component of ABDA were the thinly-stretched Royal Navy, the remaining Dutch forces in Java and Dutch East Indies, and the Australians. With the loss of Force Z, battle cruiser Repulse and battleship Prince of Wales, Royal Navy forces in the Far East by 1942 consisted merely of a few cruisers and destroyers, many in need of overhaul. The Dutch had a few light cruisers, none a match for their Japanese foes, some destroyers, and submarines which operated out of Java. The Australian Navy, similarly, contributed a few light units. The grandly-named ABDA Strike Force, commanded by Dutch Admiral Karel Doorman, was really a hotch-potch of Allied ships of varying degrees of usefulness.

While there were some successes by Dutch submarines under Admiral Helfrich in Java, US submarines were hampered by poor planning and positioning, the notorious problems with the Mk 14 torpedo, and the vulnerability of their bases at Cavite and Manila to Japanese air attack. In surface actions, ABDA naval forces had been brushed aside in the Makassar Strait, had been roughly handled by Japanese land-based aircraft off Sumatra, and mauled by a smaller IJN force in a night battle in the Badung Strait. On each occasion, the ABDA naval forces could not prevent Japanese landings. The fall of Singapore on 15 February deprived ABDACOM of anything resembling a proper headquarters for commanding the widely dispersed fragments of the forces at their disposal.

By the time the Japanese were discovered preparing for the conquest of Java, the ABDA Strike Force had been reduced by losses against IJN forces in the aforementioned battles. Marblehead had been all but wrecked by Japanese bombers at Makassar Strait, with Houston having Number Three 8-inch turret knocked out of action in the same fight. Dutch light cruiser HNLMS Tromp had been damaged at Badung Strait, and several destroyers and smaller units had been sunk over the course of the previous two months. Without a forward drydock and proper repair facilities, battle damage could not be made good. Marblehead limped more than 15,000 miles via South Africa, back to Brooklyn Navy Yard, to be repaired. Though she survived, she was lost to the ABDA Strike Force permanently.

On 27 February 1942, the remnants of the ABDA Strike Force, under Admiral Doorman, sailed into the Java Sea to block the Japanese invasion force. The two sides appeared to be fairly evenly matched, but closer investigation shows otherwise. The Japanese force consisted of two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and fourteen destroyers. They were also saddled with the task of protecting eleven transport vessels carrying the Java invasion force. Doorman's Strike Force was comprised of two heavy cruisers, HMS Exeter (of Graf Spee fame), the damaged Houston, and three light cruisers, Doorman's flag HNLMS DeRuyter, HNLMS Java, and HMAS Perth. In addition, Doorman had nine destroyers, of varying ages and quality. The Japanese heavy cruisers were, however, far more powerful than their Allied counterparts, much larger, faster, and better protected, and carrying ten 8-inch guns each, to Exeter's six, and Houston's six (three on the after 8-inch turret had not been repaired). Japanese destroyers were also far more powerful and larger than their opponents, greatly superior in gun power and shipping the lethal 24" Type 93 Long Lance torpedo.

The two forces sighted each other at about 1600 on the afternoon of 27 February. Ragged gunnery yielded few results until Exeter was struck in her boiler room by an 8-inch shell, causing her speed to drop. She heeled out of line and retired toward Surabaya with an escort of a destroyer. Dutch destroyer Kortenaer was struck by a Long Lance torpedo, exploded, and sank.

As darkness closed, destroyer HMS Electra engaged in a running gun duel with two Japanese destroyers, was riddled with hits, and had to be abandoned. The American destroyers expended all their torpedoes in an attack just after dark, but with no effect. The destroyers then retired to Surabaya. Worse was yet to come. Another destroyer, HMS Jupiter, struck a mine and sank. The Japanese would prove yet again their mastery of night actions, pounding DeRuyter and Java with gunfire, and sinking them with a salvo of torpedoes. Admiral Doorman went down with his flagship, along with all but 111 survivors of her crew and those of Java, who became prisoners of the Japanese.

The sacrifice of the ABDA Strike Force had caused almost no damage to the Japanese force (a single destroyer had significant damage and retired), and had delayed Japanese landings by less than a day.

When Exeter, and the surviving cruisers of the Strike Force (Perth and Houston) reached Surabaya and Jakarta, respectively, they found no means to affect anything other than temporary repairs. To make matters worse, there was neither fuel nor ammunition in Jakarta for Perth and Houston, who departed after dark on 28 February to try and make a run to Australia. In doing so, the two cruisers ran into a Japanese invasion fleet headed for West Java. The Allied warships managed to damage three Japanese transports, before being sunk in the early morning darkness of 1 March 1942.

Exeter put to sea at reduced speed from Surabaya for Ceylon, but flooding in her forward sections made her draft too deep for transiting the Bali Strait. She, with two destroyers, USS Pope and HMS Encounter, also limped toward the Sunda Strait. There, four Japanese cruisers and seven destroyers lay in wait, engaging and sinking the crippled Exeter and Encounter with gunfire at midday on 1 March. USS Pope was hunted down and sunk a few hours later. The ABDA Strike Force had ceased to exist.

Nowhere were the Japanese seriously interdicted by the ABDA naval or air forces. ABDACOM existed for just sixty days. The 1 March 1942 actions in Sunda Strait completed the annihilation of all meaningful Allied naval forces in the Far East.

The bravery of the Allied sailors, their suffering and sacrifice, deserves to be remembered. But like so much of history, the ABDA story should serve as a cautionary tale. Stationing weak, inadequate forces far from defended bases, or in bases subject to powerful enemy attack, carries tremendous risk. The enemy's calculus for that risk is very likely not to match your own. War planning that does not provide effective and achievable concepts of operations under realistic conditions renders initiative automatically to a capable adversary when hostilities commence. Reliance upon unproven and inadequately tested technologies to be decisive advantages in a war at sea is a fool's errand. Assumed advantages in quality of training and equipment represents dangerous arrogance that always costs lives, and sometimes costs wars.

The most indelible lesson from the ABDA debacle was one which should particularly resonate today. The projection of power ashore from the sea, dismissed today by so many suffering from "end of history" myopia, proved absolutely decisive in the Japanese push south. Then, as now, there were loud choruses declaring such operations to project power ashore were things of the past, obsolete in the more lethal mid-century wars, invoking the failure at Gallipoli and citing the capabilities of modern defensive weapons. Yet the Japanese continued to land, conquering and building bases from which land-based air power and striking capability could be launched, and leapfrogged across an area larger than the Indian Ocean, rolling up British, Dutch, Australian, and American forces in fewer than 90 days from the outbreak of hostilities. Such a lesson should be even more indelible today for us, in light of the fact that the US did precisely the same to the Japanese from mid-1942 on, from Guadalcanal and Efate and Ulithi and Guam and Tinian, all the way to Okinawa, to threaten the Home Islands by 1945.

Even if we decide to be so foolish as to cast such lessons into the dustbin of history, our adversaries certainly are not. They understand, as we should, that war in the Western Pacific will look very much like war in the Western Pacific. And they are planning accordingly. Satellite images of reclaimed land, helicopter bases, anti-ship cruise missiles, and target acquisition radars speak loudly to that fact. I do hope we are listening.

02/27/2016

The Multiple Launch Rocket System was used to great effect during Desert Storm, with its Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions warheads (basically, anti-armor/anti-personnel bomblets) raining down upon the heads of the Iraqi army at ranges of up to 70 kilometers. Beginning in the mid-2000s, the Army fielded a version of MLRS that featured a single 225 pound warhead, but that was also guided by a strapdown inertial navigation system with automatic GPS updates. And friend of the blog Esli had cause to film a pair of GMLRS strikes in 2008.

As best I can recall, I filmed this on 8 FEB 2008 during a 5-7 CAV clearance operation in vicinity of the town of Minari, south of Baghdad in an area called "the salt flats" that was filled with multiple AQI caches, lots of bones, and a few dead bodies. We spent a few days identifying, consolidating, and blowing them in place via controlled detonation. If you looked through the other pictures I posted the other day, there were a couple other caches as well. During that operation, these particular buildings were identified as likely to be storing mines and IED-making materials by our Bandit Troop and possibly were HBIEDs, so we developed a target package for pre-planned approval of use of GMLRs to destroy them (i.e. this was not an unplanned mission during a Troops-in-Contact, but a planned event). Prior to execution, B TRP went through the area and explained to the locals that we were going to do this and moved the locals out of the area before dropping the buildings. None of them lived in the buildings. I took the video, from the best of my recollection and looking at flash-to-bang time, from somewhere between 500-700 meters away. Of note, the first building has significantly less debris thrown in the air, and I believe that it had a concrete floor while the second puts up a big cloud of dirt, and I think it did not have a concrete floor for some reason. I also ran over my one and only car in a Bradley during this time, but it was a complete junker even before I ran it over. Yes, I said Bradley, but that is what a squadron S3 rolls in.

02/25/2016

We're meeting up with some fellow bloggers and fake internet friends this weekend in fabulous Tempe, AZ. So, content might be juuuuust a bit light. We'll try to get something up, but mostly we're going to be sipping margaritas by the pool.

The ground campaign of Desert Storm (aka Desert Saber) kicked off early on the 24th of February 24, 1991. My unit, A Company, 7/6 Infantry, part of the 1st Armored Division, was a part of VII Corps. We were initially scheduled to jump off early on the 25th as a part of the massive “left hook” planned by the CENTCOM CinC, General Norman Schwarzkopf. Instead, the early successes in the east with the frontal assault into Kuwait led to us jumping off at noon on the 24th. To our west, elements of XVIII Airborne Corps, the 82nd Airborne Division, the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and the French 6th Light Armored Division screened the left flank of VII Corps. VII Corps was truly the fist of 3rd Army. Commanded by LTG Freddy Franks, the corps consisted of 1st Armored Division, 3rd Armored Division, 1st Infantry Division (Mech), the British 1st Armored Division, the 1st Cavalry Division, and the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, along with a host of supporting Artillery, Engineer, Military Police, Military Intelligence, Medical and various support brigades.

The first two days, for me, at least, would see only very minor skirmishing, as we passed through the border, and sought to move the massive corps to within reach of our objective, the divisions of the Iraqi Republican Guard Corps. On the third day, we would slam into them, smashing their formations with tank, TOW, cannon, Multiple Launch Rocket, artillery and helicopter gunship fires. I remember being in awe of the concentrated firepower of an entire armored brigade at night focused on the enemy formation. The glint, the sparkle of a 120mm depleted uranium sabot round impacting on an Iraqi T-72, followed almost instantly by an eruption of flames as the onboard ammunition ignited, and the turret was blown clean off the tank, to tumble a hundred feet high.

Every IRGC unit we came into contact with was swiftly destroyed.

The problem was, we hadn’t come into contact with all of them.

And GEN Colin Powell, seeing the images of the so called “Highway of Death” where Iraqi forces fleeing Kuwait were relentlessly attacked by airpower, feared that the US would be seen as a bully. And so he lobbied President Bush to unilaterally impose a cease fire before the actual defeat of the IRGC. That single decision was, I believe, the root cause of much of the foreign policy disaster in the Middle East in the ensuing 25 years.

In the waning days of his administration, President Obama is finally making good on one of his most important campaign promises. No, we are not talking about closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, we mean something far more important: a crackdown on the black market trade in intellectual property, specifically, the nefarious black market in movies and television shows available on DVD, especially those purchased and trafficked by US military troops. This announcement comes as yet another major blow to the morale and combat effectiveness of America’s fighting men and women, who are only now coming to grips with the recent order outlawing “poncho liners,” a highly revered piece of issued equipment.

China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) commissioned its 25th Type 056 Jiangdao-class corvette on 20 February. Tongren (pennant number 507) entered service with the South Sea Fleet, and will join the 24th Light Frigate Squadron based in Shantou, Guangdong province, about 275 km north-east of Hong Kong.

Although production only commenced in 2012, the Type 056 is already one of the most numerous PLAN ships, with more in build. The 31st hull was launched on 25 December 2015 and there are indications of more in the construction pipeline. In its 2015 assessment of the PLAN's capabilities, the US Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) forecast that between 30 and 60 of these ships will be built.

WASHINGTON: Buried in a bleak Army budget is a bright nugget of revolution: a precision-guided grenade launcher called the XM25. In difficult development for over a decade, the XM25 will finally enter limited production in 2017. It will be the first radically new small arms technology since 1943.

“This has the potential to be a huge game changer for infantry combat. Once it gets into the hands of more troops, they can start experimenting and adapting tactics,” military futurist Paul Scharre believes.

In 2019 the Army expects to roll out a new, lighter body armor system. The armor will provide at least as much protection as today's system, but with more comfort, and greater flexibility to adjust based on the mission, Army officials said.

The Torso and Extremities Protection, or TEP, program cleared the engineering and development phases last summer, and will move into a few years of limited production and testing. During that time and beyond, technology advances may be integrated.

Already, improved ballistics materials have allowed the Army to cut the weight of TEP, when compared to the Army’s current heavy-duty option, the Improved Outer Tactical Vest. The IOTV, when loaded with heavy plates, weighs about 31 pounds, while a comparable TEP system checks in at about 23 pounds, or 26 percent lighter.

The reduction in weight from 31 to 23 pounds is of enormous importance.

The maximum soldier load *should* be no more than 1/3 the soldier's weight. An average soldier weighing 175 pounds, therefore, should not have to bear more than 58 pounds. Of course, in reality, our troops often are forced to bear loads of over 100 pounds, greatly reducing their mobility, and causing sports type injuries far more often than they otherwise would occur.

Reducing the load by 8 pounds while improving mobility is statistically significant, and well worth the investment.